2 April 2009
My name is Martin Streicher. I am pleased to announce three new publications dedicated to web developers.
Red: The Journal of Ruby Development
Facade: The Journal of Front-end Development
Tabula: The Journal of Open Source Database Development
The three publications obviously have a great number of topics in common between then, and much that is unique. Where ever possible, readers will benefit from the synergies and the novelties.
These journals are to be published differently than other periodicals:
1. Each journal is published as frequently as possible so material is timely and accessible.
2. The price for each journal can therefore vary, depending on the scope and size of an issue.
3. You will be able to purchase individual articles or an entire issue of each journal.
4. Each author earns a royalty for the sale or his or her individual article and the sale of an entire issue in which his or her article appears.
5. Each author earns a royalty from the advertising bundled in each article and issue.
6. A portion of all revenue garnered will be awarded as grants to further the documentation of open source technologies.
7. To guarantee the highest quality technical material, peer technical reviewers also earn a royalty on publications sold.
8. The publications will be available in PDF form and in print-on- demand form. (Pricing is to be determined.)
9. Each author retains copyright in his or her work, but grants exclusive, worldwide, first serial rights to the publication for a short period of time. Each contributing author will receive an annual subscription to the journal he or she contributes to.
10. Subscribers will have early access to all articles in development.
A formal author letter spelling out terms will be available shortly but will earnestly reflect the principles above to encourage expert contributions. Each journal will also have its own web site in the near future.
Effective immediately, I would like to call for contributors. If you are working in Rails, Ruby, MySQL, SQLite, PostgreSQL, JavaScript, CSS, ORMs, EC2, S3, CloudFront, provisioning, scaling, and high- availability, among others, and have an interesting technique, plugin, technology, or insight, please contact me with a proposal. I'll leave the proposal format informal for now, but please specify why your software or approach is novel and would be of interest to your community and peers.
Here are some story ideas to consider: Rails 2.3 novelties; Chef; Cucumber; Sass and HAML; MariaDB; embedded search engines; jQuery; scaling Rails; performance optimizations; sharding; CSS frameworks; Ruby 1.9; BDD; Ruby Cocoa; PostgreSQL goodies; deployment and monitoring; best practices; gems; plugins; and more.
You can also feel free to send community events, such as conferences, meet-ups, lectures, brigades, startup weekends, and hack fests. Each journal will contain community pages so readers can connect to one another.
Classified and commercial advertisements are also accepted. You can advertise your own or your company's services. Please contact me for rates.
About me: From 2002-2007, I was the Editor-in-Chief of Linux Magazine and am currently that publication's web development columnist. I am a regular contributor to IBM developerWorks's Linux and Open Source Zones, and also write that site's monthly "Speaking Unix" column. I also contribute to Linux Pro Magazine and to Amazon's Web Services Developer Center. I am currently a freelance Rails developer and author -- and now publisher of these journals. I live in Raleigh, NC. I am an avid comic reader, art collector, foodie, and music fan. I have two teens, two dogs, and two cats.
I look forward to your questions and proposals.
You can reach me via email, phone, Twitter, and IM.
Email: martin.streicher@gmail.com GTalk: martin.streicher iChat and Yahoo: supergiantrobot Skype: martin.s.streicher Phone: 919.741.4182 Twitter: martinstreicher web: http://www.linkedin.com/in/mstreicher
My thanks for your consideration.
